[photo] I began helping in my father's legal practice as a copy typist and office boy during the school holidays in the late 1950s and continued throughout my teens, gradually taking on more responsibilities. After an honours degree in philosophy from Warwick University, a post-graduate teaching certificate from Birmingham University, and a 2-month teaching career, I returned to the firm as a clerk in 1972 while I decided what to do next, and stayed on. In the days before compulsory attendance at law school I put myself through the Law Society's exams while working in the practice part-time. When I qualified in 1979 I remained as assistant solicitor and took over the practice on my father's sudden death the following year.

My father would take on nearly everything, and I learnt as I went: we did private and commercial conveyancing, landlord-and-tenant work, family law, employment, wills, probate, and a wide range of litigation. Later in my career I did occasional semi-voluntary work for the Office for the Supervision of Solicitors (The Law Society's disciplinary arm), considering the justice and severity of complaints and in minor cases conciliating between solicitors and their dissatisfied clients, helping them where I could to resolve their differences.

Encouraged by my maverick father's confidence, I began simplifying my language and procedures, tentatively at first but with increasing confidence as the years passed without disaster. I horrified one solicitor by submitting a punctuated draft lease, and others by asking them to clarify ambiguities in their contracts. Wills were designed to be understood by the testators and their beneficiaries. Later, bored and irritated by conveyancing's futile ritual dance of the standard jargon-filled "preliminary enquiries" that weren't understood by the parties (and would have been little use if they were), I designed a more practical information questionnaire that the sellers could complete themselves and the buyers could understand — and an inventory of fixtures and contents making clear which were included in the sale.

This policy, once it was well established, brought new clients and valuable work, and the conveyancing forms were adopted into the Law Society's protocol. Over the years I gradually reduced the range of my normal work to teach and advise other lawyers, and to rewrite their documents. I also gave occasional seminars to law students and legal translators.

In 1988 I married Jan, whom I had first known by sight when we were on the same ethics course at university and who became a friend, for many years platonic, after we met by coincidence in 1974.

I retired in 2007 and soon afterwards Jan and I moved to a hamlet in the southern French mountains. I try to keep away from the computer for much of the day, instead looking after our animals, extreme gardening (fighting gravity on steep, thinly-soiled rock slopes), attending to chores, writing to friends, and reading.

My work for Clarity and PLAIN

I joined Clarity when John Walton, the solicitor for Rugby Council, founded it in 1983 and I volunteered for the committee at the first meeting the following year. I served as membership secretary from 1987; editor of the newsletter from 1987 through its evolution into a more formal journal; founding webmaster from 1997; and chairman from 1989 to 94 and again from 1996. I retired from all those posts except webmaster in 2000 to spend more time with my practice.

For the next 10 years I developed the website and (when they asked) advised my successors — who called themselves "presidents" — as part of what grew into an "ex-presidents' group". During that period I began the custom of sending news-emails to members, acted as liaison between Clarity and PLAIN (Plain Language Association International), and for a time represented Clarity on the International Plain Language Working Group.

I joined the PLAIN board of directors when PLAIN was incorporated in 2008 but stepped down a year later, defeated by the obligation to attend the phone-conference meetings late into the night.

I enjoyed, and took great benefit from, Clarity's generous sharing of knowledge, ideas, and experience. But by 2010 few original colleagues were left and radical changes of the group's membership, style, and policy successfully tempted my withdrawal. This break, helped by my retirement from practice, started me thinking in a new direction — "into the hills beyond the plain" — creating a different perspective for the 3rd edition of Clarity for Lawyers.